I come from a very “conventional” agricultural background. My family grew peaches, walnuts, cotton and raised Holstein heifers in the Central Valley of California. I would eventually have my own conventional dry-lot dairy farm on the central coast of California. We did what was considered modern at the time, and used sprays for weeds and insects.

This conventional rearing was also conservative in nature. Perhaps not as the neo-conservatives have defined it today, but the conservative where personal responsibility was highly valued. If you made a mess, you cleaned it up. It was similar to the Gingrich-era Washington rhetoric demanding personal responsibility, especially when referring to welfare recipients and others receiving federal money to support their business endeavors.

Today, I strive to embrace a more ethical use of this term and examine what my personal responsibility is to others. As a parent, I know I am responsible for doing my best to assure my children that their futures are promising. I’m sure most parents feel this way. As an agriculturalist, I aspire to do good by feeding people in a manner that uses shared resources responsibly, and considers the opportunities of the future.

I’m very familiar with the saying “don’t complain about farmers with your mouth full,” but many agriculturists in this country have yet to acknowledge their accountability for what has already been taken from our common future. The lifeless “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico is chemical agriculture’s biggest ecological albatross in the US. Inexplicably, we’ve turned a blind eye to the impact of agricultural systems creating such aquatic disasters where rivers meet oceans all over the world.

These hypoxic (oxygen-deprived) zones are caused by increases in nitrogen and phosphorus levels in water supplies. In the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River functions as a garbage-chute for an estimated $270 million worth of fertilizer runoff, depositing all the wastes it accumulates from our heartland in the formerly biodiverse coastal water areas. These fertilizer-laden deposits fuel algal blooms that consume the oxygen dissolved in the water, reducing oxygen concentration to levels incapable of supporting life. The size and concentration of the dead zone varies year to year. Some say it’s as big as New Jersey, some say Massachusetts. Either way, that sounds too big for me.